Space, Human Geography and

The Emergence and Defeat of Absolute Space

Although distinct theoretical work on the concepts of space and place was largely absent in Anglo-American geography before the 1930s, this began to change with the growing popularity and influence of Richard Hartshorne. His major contribution to geography, a landmark publication titled The Nature of Geography (published in 1939), was the first to spark a significant debate about the goals of geography as a discipline and the definition of a concept of space. Although Hartshorne's work enjoyed tremendous popularity and remained virtually unchallenged for more than a decade, it received extensive criticism in 1953 with the publication of Fred Schaefer's article “Exceptionalism in Geography: A Methodological Examination.” The resulting scholarly exchange not only redefined geography as a discipline and ushered in the quantitative revolution but also rewrote the concept of space.

Hartshorne regarded geography as a discipline whose primary goal is the understanding of the functional integration of phenomena over space. For him, geography was chorology, a concept he borrowed from German geographer Alfred Hettner. As chorology, Hartshorne saw it as geography's goal to study the causal relationships between geographic phenomena occurring within particular regions. Geography's exceptional character as a scholarly discipline was to be both systematic and regional. Accordingly, the focus of regional geography was to study the arrangement of phenomena insomuch that the phenomena[Page 442] themselves—not the logic behind their spatial arrangement—are at the center of the study. Emphasis was put on the uniqueness of spaces and regions—not on what science normally does—to understand reality in terms of governing laws and regularities. Subsequently, Hartshorne's concept of space was one based on absolute fixed entities, that is, on the arrangement of objects anchored in space in a specific manner.

The first to significantly challenge both Hartshorne's definition of geography as a discipline and his concepts of space was Schaefer, a young economist at the University of Iowa. Schaefer wanted to make geography more scientific by following the scientific method. He argued that Hartshorne's idea of geography as chorology is based on the German model of science (Wissenschaft), which is considerably more inclusive when it comes to the methodological approaches that can be classified as scientific. In German Wissenschaft, science is any organized body of knowledge, not a distinct, agreed-on, and singular scientific method that produces a uniform body of knowledge based on hypothesis testing and a rigorous validation and verification process.

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